Who designed the original McDonald’s restaurant building with its distinctive arches?

Stanley Clark Meston designed the original McDonald’s restaurant building with its distinctive arches.

Meston was an architect whose design for the McDonald brothers used large yellow arches as prominent structural and visual elements. The building was created for McDonald’s in the early 1950s and made the restaurant easy to identify from a distance.

The arches were not initially conceived as the familiar corporate letter mark. They were part of the building’s roadside architecture, alongside the restaurant’s red-and-white color scheme and streamlined drive-in form.

Jim Schindler later transformed the two architectural arches into the joined “M” logo in 1962. That is why Meston and Schindler are both associated with McDonald’s arches, but their roles were different: Meston designed the building feature, while Schindler designed the later graphic logo.